Promise-Based Management
Harvard Business Review has a great service where they send subscribers a free daily management tip excerpted from an HBR article. Earlier this week the following tip showed up. The Management Tip was adapted from the Harvard Business Review article “Promise-Based Management: The Essence of Execution,” by Donald N. Sull and Charles Spinosa, April 2007.
At even the best-run companies, critical initiatives lose momentum. Important work sits undone. Emerging opportunities get ignored. The culprits? Poorly crafted promises — those personal pledges employees make to satisfy concerns of stakeholders inside and outside your organization.
Teach employees to craft promises carefully, and work moves forward again. One
key to a well-crafted promise is explicitness — especially when employees and
stakeholders have different cultural backgrounds or a promise involves an
abstract construct (“optimization,” “innovation”) subject to multiple
interpretations. To avoid misunderstandings, have parties make requests clear
from the outset, provide accurate progress reports, and define success (or
failure) at the time of delivery.
What makes a promise explicit?
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